LEFT BEHIND
Between 1990 and 1994, the Georgian economy experienced one of the sharpest declines in economic activity in recent history, with GDP per capita falling by more than 70 percent. Since then, however, especially after 2003, it has been growing quite fast, with the Georgian GDP per capita overtaking the 1990 level in 2013. However, the Georgian agricultural sector, in the same period, has been characterized by a quite different trend, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1. GDP Per Capita and Agriculture Value Added as a Share of GDP
During the crisis ...

The second of May, 2015, may well go unnoticed by historians of the future; but I am convinced that it marks a watershed not only in Georgia’s recent evolution – but also, maybe, in the history of our times...
On the surface of life, this Saturday marked maybe the Saturday when tourists finally returned to Tbilisi. At about 2 p.m. spotted a group of about thirty Dutch tourists assembling near the Marriot Courtyard hotel; and there were two further groups moving slowly down the sidewalks of Leselidze Street. Maintaining the festive note, the converted Lon...

Over the last weekend I was invited by an international development bank to run a workshop in the nice Hotel Eden in Kvareli, Kakheti. The topic of the workshop was “Georgia’s economic future”.
We started the workshop by discussing the great promise of development economics: “Do the right policy, and you’ll be fine”. Economists like Thorvaldur Gylfason like to show the growth paths of pairs of countries with somewhat similar characteristics, like Mauritius and Madagascar, Singapore and Malaysia, Botswana and Nigeria, and Ireland and Greece. In these pair...

Last week, I began to discuss the question whether Francis Fukuyama’s hypothesis about convergence to liberal democracy and capitalism is at least partially right. While the countries of the world have not been moving towards democracy in the last 25 years, he could still be right that the future belongs to the markets. This week, however, I will argue that this is not the case.
CAPITALISM OF THE PAST: WARM AND COZY
In the works of libertarians like Ayn Rand and David Friedman, one can find a deep-rooted conviction that the outcomes of markets are not on...

No. In this two-part article I will argue that there are challenges to capitalism on the horizon which are virtually unsurmountable. There are good reasons to believe that in 30 years from now we will not see global dominance of market systems anymore.
FUKUYAMA VS. MARX
A few weeks ago, one of the worldwide most influential thinkers of the last 30 years visited Tbilisi to give a speech at the Free University: Francis Fukuyama.
Fukuyama became famous through his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992) which offers a reinterpretation of Hegelian id...

In summer, social media were flooded with videos showing your friends (and celebrities of all levels of prominence) pouring buckets of icy water over their heads. While some people enjoyed watching this (and even participated in the Ice Bucket Challenge), many were unnerved by this charity campaign which was hardly distinguishable from an ordinary spam attack, were it not for the fact that now your friends and acquaintances were spamming you. A third group however, showed the most interesting reaction: they became moral about it.
For those who do not kno...

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